If JWST can do these amazing discoveries and detailed images, I wonder what kind of discoveries we make when starship can launch way bigger telescope than JWST. Future is Awesome!
Bigger is one option, but more of them is another; combining the data from multiple telescopes at, say, 10km apart effectively turns them into a telescope with a 10km diameter (see e.g. the event horizon telescope that made the first image of a black hole: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ )
You get the resolution but not the light capturing capability of a big telescope. The event horizon telescope had to do a lot of machine learning trickery to get an image. Also, as far I understand, it's much more difficult to do this at the wavelength of visible light.
The EHT has used machine learning techniques, but those were not required to get an image that shows the shadow of the black hole. Just using the "clean" algorithm for deconvolution yielded an image showing the shadow, and that algorithm has been in use for radio interferometry for over 40 years, and has nothing whatsoever to do with machine learning.
I watched a presentation by a researcher that worked on the EHT. She pointed out that there was a lot of machine learning to rule out wrong pictures. It’s not simple interferometry.
I am also a member of the EHT project. I'm not saying no machine learning was used by EHT team members. I'm saying that you can process the 2017 EHT data using standard radio interferometry techniques, and get an image showing the M87 black hole shadow without machine learning or any other type of AI
Perhaps, because of all the moving parts. How big is Starship though? I don't expect a telescope bigger than JWST could go up completely unfolded and expect to be perfectly resilient to launch forces. In addition, even if we had the option of a solid mirror, manufacturing such a massive mirror to perfect smoothness would be a feat. Piecemeal mirrors are probably easier in some ways because if one section is flawed, it can be replaced.
A Google search reveals: Starship has an 8 meter internal diameter. The Hubble mirror was 2.4 meters. The largest ground telescopes with a single mirror are somewhat over 8 meters in diameter. Though these don't have to withstand a rocket launch. JWST has a 6.5 meter segmented mirror with 1.3 meter per segment. It was folded up to fit into the Ariane 5 fairing.
